


Hit Like a Punch.

by fearless_seas



Series: Halemadge || Pythias & Damon [2]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, American History RPF
Genre: Ben likes to tease, Falling In Love, First Love, Love at First Sight, M/M, Teenagers, Young Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-27 00:50:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9942824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearless_seas/pseuds/fearless_seas
Summary: Fall, 1769: Nathan Hale saw Benjamin Tallmadge for the first time and forgot how to breathe.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Well I decided to write this thing instead of writing, "Nathan Hale gets a boner when he sees Benjamin Tallmadge for the first time". Nathan Hale and Benjamin Tallmadge both began Yale in 1769, graduating in 1773. Ben is fifteen and Nathan is fourteen.

**1769:** _Yale_ , the day Nathan Hale fell in love but did not fall.

_________________________

**_I kept thinking about the first time you laid your hands on me._ **

 

         “Benjamin Tallmadge, pleasure to meet you.”

            The tips of his mouth fell from their height, lips parting.

             The ribs in his chest strengthened to iron, caging his lungs, constraining his heart.

            Time stopped.

            Breathe, Nathan, just; _Breathe_.

             Distracted by his beauty, intrigued by his demeanor, consumed by his presence, lost wandering in the depths of his eyes. Seeing without looking, looking without seeing, hands full of stories. There was a sickening ache in the pit of his stomach, and he felt himself crumple as if a sucker punch to the gut. Sour taste of copper blood melting across his lips, molding into the cracks of his teeth. It was packed like the kick of a bullet, and there he was just set up for target practice. Tipping his chin down barely few inches to meet their oval peruse, shorter than he was. The afternoon sun shifting in the sky at the peak of the afternoon. In the middle of the day, Nathan Hale found the darkest brown of secrecy in his eyes that hour. He stepped back to drink it in as their dark chestnut hair scraped, just parting away from their brows and their scalp to create their own atmosphere.

          A flash of electricity invisible to the eye, drifting as a pocket of air- Nathan blinked several times- was he dreaming? He felt as if he was floating. For stars to be reborn: a nebula must collapse. He collapsed, he crumpled like paper in the senseless fingers of destiny. Where the embers dropped, he did not know; only that they circled around his feet burning circles in the Earth. Perhaps he was asleep his entire life and now he was just waking up to the sun in his eyes. Blinding sense of reality tapping against the base of his skull. He nearly forgot what it was like before he bore witness to the several shades of Benjamin Tallmadge’s hair, he did not know how it was that he got there, maybe that was just what he needed. Someone who could allow him to forget where he came from, and a person who was capable of making him love without falling.

               Chaos written in the creases of his eyes, holding grit of the past weighed on top of his cheekbones. It kept him free, kept him wild, brokenness it’ll be; it was the only thing he did not regret seeing. Nathan had been lost before, every hue from leaves, the colors of crafty sunlight, flickers of flames and rich emeralds twinkling. Almond shaped optics, thick lower lashes matching his eyebrows, the long, stretching structure of his jaw. Fascinated by the shape of his lips and how the fit so perfectly with the folds of his eyes. The corner of his mouth held into a descent crooked smile; sugary sweet with a bitter aftertaste. Only seconds later from meeting him and he was already tripped from his height. Begging time to be kinder to him; wishing he could stare for an eternity.

 

**_How the light touch of your fingertips set off fireworks inside my bones and sent vibrations to my soul._ **

 

         Nathan did not remember holding out his hand or raising his arm. But, he did recall the stranger's hand that wrapped around his palm, eagerly flinging the joint up and down with energy. The tips of his fingers tingled, sparks catching flames that ran up his shoulders and set his entire body to life. When Benjamin Tallmadge touched just one piece of him, he completely ignited. There was a hand on his mind long before there were hands on his hips reaching towards his neck. Even though the room was too crowded to dance, in the sunlight that seemed to shine a circle on the two and they shared a golden halo. He did not want an inch of himself untouched, not just his skin- little caves and coves of his heart left undiscovered by the brush of another’s fingertips. 

          Nathan was let unaware that time steadily began to move once again and he was left shivering. Ben cocked his head, his hand never declined from where they had connected. Digits interlaced and falling to their sides. Concern etched in the pacing between his forehead, blinking those delicious cinnamon orbs. Butterflies fluttered in Nathan’s chest, swallowing them as they attempted to crawl out of his throat. Wings of vibrant shades. Ben mouthed something that Nathan didn't hear, all of his senses muted and blurred. The edges of his sight pealing to gray and copper eyes growing closer as his mouth created new lyrics that Nathan still did not comprehend. The hand on his own fell and was replaced with a palm on his bicep- how he wished he could’ve shed ever bit of clothing he was wearing and feel those nails on his back.

          “Are you alright?”, the voice again. It was rough, gentle like tea before sugar, and Ben’s tongue slapped against the roof of his mouth like a box of tin that he circulated around his teeth when he talked. The name he was given was said like a mouthful of rocks. It swam in his ears, and drowned out the disturbing noises in the room.

          Nathan opened his mouth, “I- uh”, his tongue had turned to sand and he gulped. It was a new language he was already finding himself to be fluent in. He had never been tongue-tied before.

              Ben bit the side of his cheek in stance. His hand slid from his bicep and Nathan found himself susceptible to the cold of the vacancy. The fingers slid indolently down his lateral as if contemplating what exactly he was doing while he was already doing it. They culminated by scrubbing over his skin and curling together with his fingers. He pictured sitting beneath oak trees and shamrock leaves, breathing in his laugh every day, catching him beam when he does not think anyone sees. Intertwining their fingers in the center of a crowded room of students did not seem like the ideal place for such as exasperation. It said more than words could, and sang them all in tunes.

           A whisper from Tallmadge, “Here, come with me.”

          Nathan did not have much of an answer, Ben’s fingers burned a circle around his wrist and scarred the tissue of his veins. They did not bleed, from the heat he repaired the tearing flesh. Unable to control his feet, his stumbled, body weaving itself between the mass of people- he caught the unmistakable breath of Ben’s politeness, “Excuse me… sorry… pardon”. Where was he taking him? Towards the edges of the crowd where the voices were only hushed murmurs from the next room over, out the door, onto the balcony that overlooked the grassy field and the dew drops that once soaked into the soil.

          The hand on his wrist never wavered. The pads of his fingertips were heavy, shattered; the inside of Nathan’s arms fell for the sensation from his lungs that painted his chest in sorrow. The war that shadowed into the Earth from the rays of a setting sun departing the sky. There was a man named Benjamin Tallmadge nestled between chaos and having a dream. It was his gorgeous chaos that was a danger to his beautiful ordinary life. Beautifully extraordinary together. The balcony was two levels above ground, and though Nathan did not dare gaze over the edge for fearing the butterflies might escape out of his vocals.

          Even in the fading Autumn sun, there was a certain heat trapped in the rays as they flooded his skin, sinking into his bones. Silence, and tranquility; a trapping. Somehow Benjamin was a clock, one that stopped spinning the moment he stared at him. The universe halted. All things breathed each other’s stillness. Simple, lush, eternity. Time seemed to go faster now. That same hand on his forearm teaching him that it was okay to love things we did not quite understand yet.

 

**_I remembered that you laughed a lot but I forgot the reason why._ **

 

             “Hah, you alright?”, Ben exhaled and gave the same crooked grin that made Nathan's knees weak, “You look as if you’re to be sick.”

             Maybe if Ben would stop talking then his stomach would stop churning.

            Nathan swigged, at his height he felt shorter, more petit than his form and figure. A shift of silence, Ben pivoted his foot and rubbed his cheek with the back of his sleeve, “One day at church I was sick all over the row before me.” he let out a snicker and set his focus to the flooring, letting it dip. “My father was not pleased in the least.” he shook his head. The smile never dissolved from his visage.

               As if on queue, the tips of Nathan's ears turned pink and he pursed his lips, his ears turned hollow. Ben’s mouth continued to move- but it wasn’t the stories that intrigued Nathan the most, it was the sparkle Ben was enveloped in when he spoke of the things he loved, he spoke mostly of home. That smirk carried weight as if a loaded gun. Bullets ricocheted off of his chest, in a circle becoming absorbed in Ben’s chest once again as recycled sentences and spoken paragraphs.

             Nathan did not hear a single word that Benjamin was speaking.  

 

**_I was busy admiring how your eyes reflected the light coming from the window sill_ **

 

          Nathan let out a weak simper, completely and utterly exasperated by that shifty grin. He never was quite able to pry his gaze from the forest-eyed boy. “The sunset looks quite beautiful doesn’t it?”. Without tripping over his own words he had managed out a sentence; the very first set of words he had ever spoken to him.

            Ben didn’t look away towards the sun, tilting his head and pivoting his feet, he smeared the rough rub of his knuckles together and slouched his shoulders. His eyebrows centered, “You’re not even looking at it?”.

             Nathan halted, pausing for a moment. Why blind himself by gazing at the sun when the colors of the wind were scattered in patterns across the flesh and skin of Benjamin’s cheeks? The hues of wine coated across his jaw, saffron flecked around his nose, peach covered his cheeks and amber painted the inside of his eyelids. Colors erupting in the atmosphere, the absolute glowing twilight. Dust breaking as the sun gave the moon one last kiss; a transfer of light. Nathan never knew his fingertips could he hungry like the sun starves to graze the surface of Ben’s skin every day.

              Never noticing the brown in the sunset because it melted into golden rays, circulating an eclipse. Not a thing boring about brown eyes, not even when in the later hours encroach; they just turn into a collapse of their own. Nathan looked down and saw stars while Ben submitted his visions to the ground- not to the cosmos above. Colors of the leafs that drifted from the branches in a subtle serenity and exquisite beauty.

             Tracing a scar that was nicked just above Ben’s upper lip, “It is not required to look at something beautiful, to tell that it is beautiful.”

          Ben looked satisfied with the answer.

 

**_and how I wanted to know how your lips tasted like._ **

 

         Nathan would wipe that smirk off of his face, leave a little poem in his mouth and find himself fascinated with how they fit so perfectly together. Sip in the buds of his mind and touch hidden places left undiscovered. Spilling into each other to formulate the horizon. Eternity never tasted so good. Ben’s lips were slightly chapped, sharp as a knife as the corners and pulsating for all that he was. He had swam in lakes before, but they were never enough, everyone else was just a pond and in Ben he explored the sea.

             Nathan quivered, a shudder reverberating down the pillar of his spin and he caught Ben swallowing, the column of his throat bobbing. He wondered if he had ever spoken more breathtaking words than those that would be traced on the roughest skin and whispered through breathless moans. In the quietude hanging in the atmosphere so majestically, and the crimson of the autumn, heavens ignited in the shades of oranges and marigold flowers. It seemed every petal was another resounding melody and syllable in Ben’s name.

             “What is your name?”, Ben asked, leaning against the edge of the balcony, shifting his neck and letting the sunshine flood in gentle caresses over the back of his skull, fragments of the firmament scattering with every turn of his head. His fingers absently traced circles in the stone stronghold. “My name is-”

             “-Benjamin Tallmadge” simple lyrics he was unable to contain.

              The crooked smile penetrated the air between them, “You’re one to catch on, aren’t you?” he chuckled and Nathan sucked in a sharp breath. Ben jutted out a hip, placing a hand underneath his jaw in amusement and blowing a few stray hairs out off of his foreheads.

              _His hair was too long._

             “Just because I seem to have become petrified does not weaken my abilities to hear.”

            It took a while before Benjamin comprehended the statement and nodded his head. “You can just call me Ben, you know?”.

           _Ben._

            Nathan inclined his head, feel the tension exit his body as his shoulders fell from just below his ears in anxiety. Tallmadge seemed so beautiful out of place- almost as if he intended for himself to be so, like catching the moon still in the sky at the beginning of the day.

             “What is your name? I’m sure you have a name, everyone has one.”, a hint of amusement colored his vocals.

              _My name is Nathan Hale._

               “Does it matter?”, was all that he could come up with and he ran a shaking hand across his own wrist.

                Ben cocked an eyebrow, “I’ll find out soon enough”. It was meant as a tease but he was hungry for some sort of meaning.

               “How about for now we find bliss in the company?”

              Ben bit his lip, but did not answer. “Well, I’m Benjamin Tallmadge. Fifteen years old from Setauket, New York.” That explains it, New Yorkers were known for never being quite able to keep their mouths shut. He paused for a moment, in thought, “I hope you do know that am not usually keen to speaking quite as much as I am now.”

             “And I do not tend to speak so very little as I am now.” Nathan responded, scrubbing the edges of his jacket coat together. 

              “Then why so little words?”

             “I only get to meet you for the first time once.”

 

**_Now I realize that every moment spent with you shined._ **

 

           The unmistakable tincture of rose to the surface of Ben’s ears caused him to purse his lips, throwing his eyes frantically away and gazing out towards the edge of the grass that cut into a stalk of trees. It was a pain that he was out of reach of an arms grasp, feeling like water without fish. The loops of his fingers empty and aching in a sense of pulsations, empty, longingness. Nathan might fear to close his eyes that night, all his dreams would be in delicate silhouettes in the only light, reflection from the moon across the sea. He wondered if he would wake up in a pool of sweat with bruises written across his hips telling stories in the purple and black complexions.

              Stumbling through fate and consequences, with a brilliant illusion of choice. He always imagined a pretty girl with long hair, fluttering eyelashes and a porcelain smile, with eyes like sugar from a mind just as sweet. It would be gradual, a choosing of what he had done. He had never imaged two second before meeting Benjamin Tallmadge that he would turn his head to find a hand stuck out, it was the first thing he saw until he followed his gaze up towards the gold colored buttons that trekked in a line across his breast, lacing to a collar of faint yellow, curling around pointed tip of his chin, side tracked for only a second by the singular freckle indented beneath his ear where his hair nearly covered it, or the cheerful creases that punctuated off of the auburn of his eyes and not to forget the tiny white scar the etched off from his poignant grin; just below his nose.

          Nathan would stand alone underneath the stars and shout to the heavens at the top of his lungs at how beautifully tragic it was to wear a loaded pistol as a mouth. Every time Ben shook his hair, turned his neck, Nathan would catch sight of the stars that twinkled off of the strands and onto his shoulders, Ben flicked his hair and Nathan was caught someplace lost in between life and death, unsure of whether he was a reason to want to live, or to die. Not for a moment were there verses of disappointment or annoyance communicated when Nathan did not respond to his transactions. The fire from his touch when he gathered at the base of his wrist, pulsations and pressure points and veins beneath, burning a hole in the skin. The ink in his veins staining his brain, vision growing cloudy, hopelessly beyond help and saving.

           Nathan had seen the waves that wallowed in other’s eyes, saw the oceans and the peeling oceans they held and he preferred to stay dry. The graying peaks crashing and rolling, pushing them beneath the surface, sinking down so far you will never breath again. Nobody had ever told him that it was possible to become rich on the flecks of silver that transpired, hidden between shades of auburn. The brown became the bark that spiraled up the bones of a tree and spread out into reaching branches and thick roots. Nathan decided that it was better to become lost in a forest where he could survive, then trapped drowning in hurricanes and storms.

          Leaving the crowd, every minute since then was eidetic. Ben switching hands to maneuver, bringing him to this very same balcony just so Nathan could fall helplessly more in love with the colors of the sunset that painted themselves across Ben’s cheeks and bite in the skin of his lips. The way his few words caused rouge to infect the tips of Ben’s ears and crawl up his neck like gangrene. The welkin never simply reflecting across his skin, it soaked into his bones to churn the fire that was his ambition, swallow the flame down into his mouth when he spoke and it glistened across his teeth.

             “Are you feeling better?”.

           Nathan was caught off guard and mumbled out a faint response. Ben slid his hand off of the banister, taking few steps closer to the petrified one barely few inches apart and the edges of their shoes bumped each other’s. There were cold fingers circulating his wrist again, it faded the flame that his fingers had caused before. They nervously grazed each others and a thrill of goosebumps rose to the surface of his sheath. How would it feel to have his nails running through his scalp, combing every little strand in extra little care. 

               “You’re quite curious, you know that.”, there was that mock of amusement. “You’ve been breathing since you were born, why did you forget now?”

           Nathan hadn’t thought of it that way. It had only been twenty minutes and he was already comparing Benjamin Tallmadge to metaphors. He was already humming under his breath the rhythm of his heart beat, tapping his fingers to a beat and melodic harmony. Ben’s fingers grew roots and burrowed underneath the skin, wrapping around his veins, creating a home on his lifeline. 

             “Are you ready to get back?”

           But he did not want it to end.

           Nathan sighed, perhaps a bullet would be better- it would give him the opportunity to throw the trigger. “Yes… Ben”.

             This caught another smile.

             Nathan turned his head, letting Ben’s hold on his wrist fall as he headed from the balcony back through the door to the building.

             Ben close behind, beaming as he saw the sunshine leave Nathan’s golden locks. He jumped, scattering to follow him, “You never told me your name!” he called, threading his own fingers together, crossing his arms and punctuating his hips.

            Nathan ceased, angled around and caught one last look of Ben’s face in the sunlight from the entry to the balcony and the reflection of his shadow on the marble flooring. Infatuated with a boy who did not yet know his name.

              “Believe me, you’ll know soon enough.”

             It was his turn now to smile now as he fell across the room, forcing himself not to look back. Benjamin Tallmadge hit him like a punch to the stomach, the sickening ache in the pit of his gut had past. Feeling a little drunk, he held his head a higher attempting to contain the joy spreading across his cheeks and the multicolored sparks that flickered across the bed of his wrist where Ben’s hands once were.

           _Benjamin Tallmadge, you’ll be seeing him very soon._

 

**_Now I know that I am utterly and undeniably, addicted to you._ **

**Author's Note:**

> It was actually first written as Ben's perspective, but I changed it to Nathan. I love these two. If you have any historical questions, just comment or hit me up on Tumblr @sonofhistory comments and kudos are highly appreciated, thank you if you got this far!


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